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| Solar Panels |
You too can utilize the energy of sun to run you devices.
Here i would like to share the options
to turn solar energy rays into power,
computation of the solar energy needs of your house and some impressive ideas.
There are two major ways to convert solar radiation
into electricity, photovoltaic and concentrated solar power. Photovoltaic cells
convert solar radiations directly into electricity. You may already be familiar
with photovoltaic cells if you have ever used a solar calculator. Photovoltaic
cells in calculators are a good idea to get rid of batteries but these can’t be
used for higher power needs owing to their higher price. Typically the power efficiency
of photovoltaic cells is 12-24%, which is lower than other energy sources. The
high cost of photovoltaic cells prevents their wide usage but they do find
applications in areas like satellites which need continuous power without
batteries, and small devices (calculators and watches).
Concentrated
solar power (CSP) systems concentrate the sun beams to produce heat and then
convert the heat energy into electricity by conventional ways. There are
several designs for concentrating the sun beams but the method is same in all
designs: There is a reflector which concentrates all the sun beams in a
collector, also called the absorber. A fluid (molten salt, for example) flowing
in the receiver stores the heat. The hot fluid flows to the heat engine and the
heat energy is converted into electricity.
CSP System
Designs
Parabolic-trough
design :- In parabolic design, there are parabolic mirrors collecting the heat
on a receiver that is placed on the mirror’s focus. The energy production is
explained above: The hot fluid is flown through pipes and transferred to the
heat engine. This is the most practised method of solar power plants and there
are several such fully operational power plants. Parabolic trough power plants
have an efficiency of 20%, but less area
usage and cheap design are their key advantages over the other designs
Dish
Designs
Dish
designs use the same principle as the satellite receivers. The dish collects
and focuses the energy at the receiver facing the dish, There are several
advantages of the dish design. These provide the highest solar to electric
efficiency and that too nearly 31.3% among all the CSP technologies. Also each
unit has its own standalone structure which makes it fit for smaller
applications. However, the dish design is costlier than any other systems
because of their compiler design. Also, it requires more maintenance.
Nevertheless high efficiency is promising a future for dish designs also.
Power
consumption of home appliances
Before
calculating solar power system needs of your house, you need to calculate the
electricity consumption of your house. Let’s assume you want to power backup
for electrical load of one tube light, one fan, one TV, one Computer and one
bulb. These appliances altogether will cosume about 326 W of power if you take
a 400 W solar inverter it will give a backup of 320 W considering all the core
and copper loses. If you don’t use a computer the power consumption reduces to
246 and so you can use your inverter smoothly.
How
many solar panels do you need for your home
To
calculate the solar power needs of your home, proceed as follows.
- How much power do you use per day ?
To
calculate this get your last one year’s power bills and find the average power usage per day . But this maynot be accurate because it wont work if you buy new
appliances every year, so take the average and then add a few more watts to it.
If
electicity consumption of a house is 168 units then daily power usage will be
168/30 = 5.6 and as 1 kWh means 1 unit the power consumption per day would be
equal to 5.6kWh.
- Calculate the total wattage of the solar power needed.
Before
you can work out number of solar panels you may need, you need to find out how
many usable hours of sunlight your region gets. Now take the average daily kWh
calculation and divide that by the number of daily usable sunlight hours and
then multiply it by 1.25.
Battery
back up
Now
all you have to do is to connect the solar panels in the circuit to the
suitable inverter that you think would be the best to power up your house. Now
you are independent of the gird system and you can now manufacture the power
all by yourselves.
